Sam Raimi dropped out of college in Michigan to make a thirty-minute 8-millimeter sample film so he could show potential investors he had a good idea for a horror movie and the ability to pull it off. Shot in 16-millimeter on a budget of $375,000, the sample became The Evil Dead, termed by Stephen King "the most ferociously original horror film of 1982." Dino De Laurentiis gave Sam $3.5 million to make Evil Dead II, and it won the 1987 Golden Unicorn -- the grand prize at the Paris Science Fiction & Fantasy Festival.

Making Movies is in print, and available at amazon.com:

My friends and I started making movies in high school. We'd make mostly comedies. We'd all do everything; we didn't have individual titles like producer, writer, director. We'd pitch in leaf-raking money and snow-shoveling money and go to the local K mart and buy a few rolls of Super-8 film, put it in the old camera, and start making pictures.

I recommend that young filmmakers make films in Super-8 (film, not videotape) because it's a great training ground. You have all the same basic elements that are used in professional filmmaking, so it's a chance to refine your skills and techniques. You've got to write a script, deal with camera placement, movement, angles, and lenses. The actors have to be directed and orchestrated in the same manner as in 35-millimeter filmmaking. Same with the lighting and editing.

At Michigan State, my brother Ivan and I and our friend Robert Tapert decided to make Super-8 movies and market them on campus. We would shoot a Super-8 movie, edit it, and score it, then take out ads in the student newspaper. We would then show the movie in a room that we'd rent from the University. Ivan and Robert would sell and rip the thickets and I would run the projector -- we had our own little movie company. We were actually making some money doing this, and Rob said, "Hey, let's try it on a big scale; let's do it like the big boys and make a professional feature film." Bruce Campbell joined the effort, and in August of 1979 we formed the limited partnership Renaissance Motion Pictures.

We did some research and decided to make a horror movie because we figured horror movies, no matter how badly made, could always find a market in some drive-in somewhere. We looked and said, "Yeah, they did it right with Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- now if we can make one that really works, we could make our investors money." We didn't know if we could make them rich, but we figured that if the investors believed in us enough to finance the project, we had a responsibility to make a good enough picture that would break them even and hopefully make them a profit.

Because we had never made a horror movie, our first step was to learn how to make one. We sat in the drive-ins for a summer, and I made a couple of Super-8 horror movies with Bruce and Robert to try to figure it all out. The first ones were very, very poor -- I didn't quite understand what it was all about -- but finally we decided that we had the formula down. We dropped out of school and got jobs as busboys, custodians, and cabdrivers to gather seed money and begin this great undertaking.

I took the script for The Evil Dead and rewrote it to ten pages and entitled it Within the Woods. Robert, Bruce, and I filmed it for $1,600 -- a thirty-minute horror movie in Super-8 to show to potential investors as a sales tool. IT showed people that we knew the horror movie basics and could scare the audience in a minor way.

The Super-8 movie crystallized exactly the type of picture we intended to make in the minds of the investors. This Super-8 showpiece was probably the biggest help toward raising the money. We also created a prospectus to enable us to sell shares in the movie legally. We took the Super-8 movie and showed it to doctors, dentists, lawyers, and anyone that might have a few extra dollars.

The fact that we wore suits and ties and had matching briefcases helped us as much as anything, I think, because an "official" image helped to instill confidence and project respectability. The venture seemed so wild to people that we needed every bit of evidence of a businesslike attitude we could muster. People thought we were crazy to drop out of college to raise such an ungodly amount of money.

There are many miserable moments for the independent filmmaker trying to raise a lot of money. Where will the next investor come from? Where?

But persistence is everything, and it often pays off. In Detroit, for instance, people were interested in investing in a movies because it seemed exciting and different to them. High rollers who might otherwise have put $10,000 into a trip to Las Vegas decided to take a gamble on us.

During the money-raising process I ran into plenty of con men. Most were so crooked you'd have to screw 'em into the ground to bury 'em. Watch out for the ones who say "You need $285,00 for your movie? No problem!" Of course $385,000 is a problem! Leave quickly. They are full of hot air. No money will come from them.

Renaissance Motion Pictures was lucky to find Irvin Shapiro of Films Around the World, Inc., a rare breed of honest man. Through his international sales of The Evil Dead we were able to return almost all of our investors' money.

Irvin is the man responsible for naming The Evil Dead. The picture was originally titled Book of the Dead, but Irvin tore into it a word at a time. He said, "Book? That'll scare off the kids. Book's a nasty word to the horror crowd. They don't want to know about reading. Of the? That doesn't say anything. That's out. Dead? Hmmm. That can stay. We'll call it The Evil Dead."

Irvin is pure businessman. He has a very hard time believing in movie deals. His motto is "It's not a deal when they tell you it's a deal. It's not a deal when you sign the contract. It's not even a deal when you get the check. It's only a deal once you've spent the money."

That's why Irvin Shapiro is the sales agent we needed.

The biggest reason Renaissance Motion Pictures made the sequel to The Evil Dead was to finally throw our investors into profit. We owed them everything. Also, we wanted to star Bruce Campbell in the film without fear of studio replacement. Embassy Pictures removed Bruce from our second feature, Crime Wave. We knew that if we made Evil Dead II, no one would remove Bruce because he's the only actor who survives in the original The Evil Dead.

We worked with quite a few people from The Evil Dead on Evil Dead II, including cameraman Tim Philo, animator Tom Sullivan, optical effects specialist Bart Pierce, and composer Joe LoDuca, Joel Coen, who was the assistant editor on The Evil Dead went on to make two successful films Blood Simple and Raising Arizona with his brother Ethan.

Working with DEG (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group) on Evil Dead II was great. Dino and the boys had some very good script comments, so we made some changes, but after that they left us very much alone. When we delivered a picture that was potentially X-rated, they said, "Okay, we realize that the strength of the picture lies in its current form; we won't go for an R rating; we'll just release it as it is." So we were able to preserve the integrity of the picture. We did go out with a disclaimer on the film saying that the picture contains "scenes of violence that may be too intense for persons under the age of seventeen."

But the lack of an R has slowed up distribution of Evil Dead II. Without an MPAA rating, many theater chains won't show the film, and lots of newspapers won't carry the print advertising. But I still believe we did the right thing. The original versions of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II remain intact, and I'm very pleased about that.

My aspiration is to tell entertaining stories through the medium of film, stories that are as visually exciting as possible and that hopefully will create an experience that is uplifting for the audience.

©1989 John Russo